just a book reader reading books

The Sunday Salon

Earlier this week I was looking at the stack of books sitting on the corner of the desk waiting to be read and realized I was putting them in order. There was a mystery, a fantasy, and some historical fiction. I don’t like to read books that are similar back to back, unless I’m reading a series, and I purposely look for something different when I finish one and move on to another. I know that’s probably fairly common. For me it just makes reading that much more enjoyable, always something new. I try for a diverse reading list but do read a lot more fiction than non-fiction and I’m hoping to change that this year.

The Wife's Tale

For this week’s round-up: I finished The Black Tower by Louis Bayard and The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens and started Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell. Both were good but I really loved The Wife’s Tale. Lansens has a way of making you feel completely uncomfortable with her characters and then you fall in love with them. I almost abandoned the book because it was so depressing (it’s about a morbidly obese woman whose husband leaves her on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary) but I felt like I couldn’t. I was already hooked and even though I felt like I was watching the events through my fingers laced across my face, I had to keep going. It’s a very good book and I’m glad I stuck with it.

The Black Tower

The Black Tower was about Louis the Seventeenth, the long lost son of Marie Antoinette and Louis the Sixteenth. It was a good mystery but by the end of the book I couldn’t decide if I liked any of these people or not. For me, the events were much more interesting than the characters although it was a very interesting list of characters. It was still a good read and I plan to do a longer review of it in the coming weeks. I don’t read many mysteries so this was a nice change for me.

On my reading list this week: Finish Stonehenge by Cornwell and start The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbury and The Midnight Guardian by Sarah Jane Stratford. I gave in and bought myself a copy of The Swan Thieves and while I promised myself that I would read all my library books this month and leave my own for February, I maybe breaking that truce to start this one.